AbstractThe present study examines the availability and recovery of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in scholarly Library and Information Science journals selected based on their high impact factor published between 2008 and 2017. A total of 4966 articles were downloaded and 208506 references were extracted. A PHP script was used to check 28108 URLs and extract the lexical features like path depth, character length and top-level domain. The research findings indicated that out of 28108 URL references, 15746 references contained URLs, DOIs were found in 11881 references and 481 references contained arXiv identifier/WOS article identifier. It was found that 25178 URLs were accessible and the remaining 2930 URL references were missing. The majority of errors were due to HTTP 404 error code (Not found error). The study also tried to recover the inaccessible URLs through Time Travel. Almost 60.92%
of inaccessible URLs were archived in various web archives. The findings of the study will be helpful to authors, publishers and editorial staff to ensure that the URLs will be accessible in future.